If commerce has been our ruin, our form of government is our salvation. Imagine a hereditary aristocracy, a State church, a limited monarchy to have existed here during the last thirty years. By this time it would have been owned hand and foot, tied up and anchored in every abuse, engaged day and night in devising new yokes for the people. The interests now dominant know the ropes and do their best, but they cannot corrupt the sea. They cannot stop the continual ferment of popular election and reform candidate. The whole apparatus of government is a great educational machine which no one can stop. The power of light is enlisted on the side of order. A property qualification would have been an anchor to windward for the unrighteous. At the bottom of the peculiarly hopeless condition of Philadelphia lie the small house and lot of the laboring man. They can be taxed. They can be cajoled and conjured with. Corruption is entrenched. * * * * * We find then in democracy a frame of government by which private selfishness, the bane and terror of all government, is thrust brutally to the front and kept there, staring in hideous openness. Nothing except such an era as that which we have just come through, during which we have grown used to absolute self-seeking as the normal state of man, could so have glazed the eyes of men that they could not see thrift even in a public official as a crime, or self-sacrifice even in a public official except as a folly. And yet so sound is the heart of man that in spite of this corruption and debauchery, the American people, the masses of them, are the most promising people extant. We have a special disease. It is our minds which have been injured. We are cross-eyed with business selfishness and open to the heavens on all other sides. For this openness we must thank Democracy. Here are no warped beings, but sane and healthy creatures under a temporary spell. The American citizen, by escaping the superstitions studded over Europe since the days of the Roman empire, has a directer view of life (when he shall open his eyes) than any people since the Elizabethans. He will have no prejudices. He will be empirical. But he must forswear thrift, and the calculating of interest in his sleep. No religious revival will help us. We are religious enough already. It is our relaxation. Only the painful unwinding of that intellectual knot into which our minds are tied,--that state of intense selfishness during which we see business advancement as our first duty, taught us at the cradle, enforced by example, inculcated like a religion,--can make us begin to operate our institutions upon the lines on which they alone can run freely, and we ourselves develop normally. This unwinding will come through a simple inspection of our condition. Let no one worry about the forms and particular measures of betterment. They will flow naturally from the public acknowledgment by the individual of facts